Amanda told me I would like Farmer John, the boss, at her new job. I wanted her to explain further, but we were late, and about to miss out on the pupusas her El Salvadorian coworkers were serving at staff lunch. I recalled Angelic Organics from her previous mention when she showed me the unattended stall where farmers would leave vegetables and a pay-as-you-can bucket. This practice was foreign to my urban ears, helping me realize that I was no longer in Chicago.

I was visiting Amanda to remove myself from the confines of the stifling urbanity, dense with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. I missed my friend who was forced to leave Chicago when her lease was up a month after the shutdown began. She had suddenly moved in back with her parents in Rockton, Illinois, and returning home for her was isolating. She had few remaining friends in her hometown and was mentally spiraling. 

Therefore, the job at Angelic Organics was a Godsend as it took her back into the beloved country life of her upbringing. It was opening a new source of community, and she wanted me to see it while the weather was still permitted. Since my autoimmune body was growing stir-crazy with the circulating air in my own home, I searched for cleaner country air. I was eager to have someone unveil to me the earth's tender secrets.

I had imagined John to be a 70-year man in a straw hat, rubber boots, and overalls with a dirty rolled-up sleeve shirt underneath. I'd imagine him as a sweet man who would let us pet the goats, show us the farm equipment, and maybe ride on the tractor while lecturing us about the land. The only thing that I got right was the straw hat. 

The day I met him, John had on rimless star-shaped glasses, a pink-purple tie-dye silk scarf delicately knotted within the collar of his navy button-down, and a silver braided belt that held his denim jeans. Although he briefly showed us where vegetables were boxed, our farm tour had little to do with the farming equipment or the fields. Rather, the tour consisted of his theatre costumes—including the bumblebee one he'd worn in a music video—pink lazure walls in his barn interiors, residency artists' artwork, and libraries of Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical and biodynamic ideologies. 

John wasn't merely a tale—he was an experience to be had alongside his lover, the farm.

The farm itself was not only acres of rainbow crops but was barn houses and buildings painted teal, mustard yellow, or cream-white, with scarlet, purple, and orange accents. Of course, the buildings hadn't been those colors originally. The barn makeover arrived in John's mind during a soul-searching pilgrimage to Mexico, where the rustic walls inspired him. According to him, the Angelic's barn walls themselves demanded their artistic renovation. As he envisioned placing down one paint color, the other color would reveal itself in his imagination. 

A yellow and black striped 70s Volkswagen Beetle was stationed in the grassy courtyard next to the picnic tables where our lunch was served. Amanda and I positioned ourselves next to the celebrity farmer himself, who had two journalists interviewing him about his documentary film and Community Supported Agricultural business. He leaned back in this folding chair with his arms crossed and his face always tipped towards the sky. I took him in as I ate my spicy chicken soup and listened to his nasal voice almost sing about the old college days.

"I went to Beloit College thinking I was going into Psychology, and then I met the theatre kids," he cackled. He grew up as a modest farm boy, the son of a dairy farmer, and a respected school teacher. Unfortunately, his father passed away when he was still a teen, and being the son, it was his responsibility to inherit and take over the farm — a conviction from which John had never wavered. However, seeing the colors and the fashion of his fellow theatre colleagues eventually inspired him not only to continue sowing seeds into the soil but to become a performance artist and writer. He has been married to his editor, Heidy, who was only 29, and while they had no children, his books and stories were what they birthed together.

"I'm glad I didn't go into Psychology. But, you know, I think writers understand people better than psychologists do," he winked at me.

Naturally, he asked me what I was about as one of the new visitors. I told him that I was a singer-songwriter and writer and that it was a privilege to witness the farm that gave my friend a temporary purpose amidst the chaos. We talked about artists living on the farm, two of them who had taken residency there since the pandemic had prohibited them from continuing their travels. The farm for them was magic, a fulfillment of a dream for Alizé, a twenty-year-old photographer, wife, and a witch. Her husband Eddaviel was a Dominican muralist and illustrator, and both of them had the privilege of contributing to the local Rockford art scene.

"He's brilliant, let me tell you," John said as he put his arm around Eddaviel's shoulders. The muralist himself explained his elaborate fusion of mural art, psychedelic rock, dance, Alizé's videography, and meticulously timed screen projections. His Spanish accent lulled me into his mind of strategy, precision, raw passion, and a little madness. They invited me back for their socially distanced outdoor performance the following week, and I felt like I was temporarily adopted into their club.

I had already assumed that John was someone who had been highly misunderstood. He had already hinted at the conservatism of the 1960s midwestern farming community. Still, it would only be later that I would find out through the documentary how truly ostracized John was from the local towns. He was cast out as a devil worshipper, orgy gatherer, flamboyant rebel, drug dealer, and lunatic—the farmer and his farm being targeted objects of slander, violence, and vandalism to those who could not understand their color. It wasn't until the 80s that his reputation was mildly redeemed. Traditional commercial farmers in the surrounding area had begun losing all their farms, and John wrote and performed a play about the decline of the agricultural industry to console the community. Due to his empathy for their struggles, they began reinstating him back into the farming community. All in the area have celebrated John as undeniably a good farmer, mainly because he risked being a pioneer in the organic farming movement in the late 80s and early 90s.

As the children occupied the journalists with the picking of flowers, John quietly signaled that he wanted to give me an exclusive tour. He mentioned that the one he would give the journalists would be different anyhow, so he tried to make a particular round through the buildings for Amanda's nearest.

We entered the teal barn and climbed up a narrow baby blue-colored ladder into a loft space with side and ceiling windows. The room was furnished to resemble a life-size dollhouse, and I would recognize this aesthetic repeated in other rooms around the premises. He explained that Lazure pink painted walls mimicked a watercolor appearance that was healing the soul and the eyes. There was an element of play and whimsy wherever we walked, but the high ceilings left an eerie hollowness despite pointing toward heaven. The candle at the windowsill caught my eye, the kind of candle I had seen in Catholic stores for praying to the saints. It was burned for the archangel Michael. Yearly, John would host the Anthroposophical society to celebrate Michaelmas, the second most important festival according to their tradition, only behind Easter. There would be a ritual where musicians circle buildings playing and singing live music. They aimed to match the frequency of a room. In that vibrational matching, a connection would be made to the spirit realm. He asked if I had experienced anything like this as a musician.

I hesitated in my answer at first, recognizing that Amanda was listening in. She was much more conservative in her Christian upbringing than I was and was new to talking openly about the supernatural. For me, it was something I had invested in for years now but was low-key about my mystical ventures.

"I know when I'm in the right place playing and singing my music. When it feels right, I'm connected to God and the angelic. Regardless of professional technique, it's about a space's spiritual atmosphere, and when it vibes, my voice floats, and it's effervescent. I've been told you could almost hear angels singing with me. Sadly, it's been a while since that has happened," I struggled to speak.

John's expression remained serious, but his eyes twinkled as he turned to the bookcase behind a curtained closet. He drew out a few vintage books, one of which was about Michaelmas. He began a mini-lecture on Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher who was banned by Christian orthodox circles and founded his own sets of followers. I had heard of Steiner as an early childhood and music educator, and his interdisciplinary approach to life but also his emphasis on healing through play and fantasy. He went on to explain Steiner's architecture, the scientific understanding of the spirit world, and biodynamics, the seed of the organic farming movement as we now know it today. What he didn't say, but I knew was that he could read vibrations, the unspoken language in his rooms, in his vegetables, and people.

He finished his lecture and led us onto the following buildings, always returning to the idea that the buildings themselves would tell him their needs. He would balance the space by adding another piece of furniture, placing another decoration, or refreshing the wall painting. Next, he showed us the barn silo where music shows were once held and the kitchen where recipes were invented. Finally, we scaled the narrow hallway where party guests used to shuffle through with wine glasses and where he caught the eye of one of his lovers.

"You say that you feel like you're one of us. So are you polyamorous too?" he poked. I blushed because my love life was a lackluster tragedy of friend zones.

We arrived upon what looked like the backstage closet of a theatre set, where you could see the barn's wooden beam skeleton. There, he showed us his collection of costumes, glitter pants, mannequins, and boxes of documentary footage material. We saw his Roger Ebert thumbs up, and he told us stories about touring to sixteen countries, spontaneously and terribly performing in front of Al Gore at an open mic, and explained the stacks of virtually untouched recipe books he wrote to educate shareholders on food energetics and how to properly use the vegetables they received in their CSA subscription boxes. It was the first conversation we had about the food itself.

"I'm tired of people talking about food regarding vitamins and nutritional facts. Food has an energetic quality to it. Raw vegetables have the most live energy, and then there's a succession that comes after that. Food energetics was too out there for the mainstream population, so these books didn't do so well." He handed me a book, sensing I was about to walk out with it anyways.

"You'd be surprised, I've been in the Eastern medicine world for a while now, and it's become fairly popular now here in the US because so many people have allergies, intolerances, and sicknesses modern American medicine hasn't been able to solve," I hinted. "I think you were just before your time."

John sighed. "There isn't money to print, push, and market another round of these guys." His response was similar when I asked if he had ever thought about renting out the space for weddings as a way for the farm to cushion itself financially. The area was gorgeous, and I knew barn weddings had become popular even among city folks. He shook his hand at me and turned his head away. "Absolutely no weddings. I don't want to deal with the outside public." Then, he went into the outrageous story of one particular family who had insisted on hosting their banquets there. It ended with one of the servers hoarding the leftover wine in the backstage nook where he fell asleep drunk the night before and the mother fighting to get the bottles back the following day. No weddings, indeed.

The old but vivacious farmer brought Amanda and me to the last of his favorite rooms. It was an attic with more remnants of John's former life. I noticed the bumblebee costume hung on the wall and a handmade dollhouse with 1950s furniture and kitschy wallpaper. A ventriloquist doll with a proper suit lounged in the corner. I spotted the stained glass window hanging over the stairway entrance from which we had just emerged. John glided to the painted female nude, reminiscent of a Gauguin painting, and I wondered if it was one of his former lovers. I could feel the dust settling and crawling up my skin, and I was shivering. But I could see John's imagination roll out the party that once existed — a rock band playing at one end of the room, a friend in glimmering sequins and another in a chicken onesie cozied up at the bar, his girlfriend Isa curled back on the couch with a cigarette in her hand as she listened to a few friends discussing their next play, and the room filled with smoke.

"I can't seem to get anyone to come up here to hang anymore," he said. It sincerely puzzled him. He went on to tell us about one woman living at the farm who handmade extravagant shrines. She had once had a truck in which she would carry the ornate decadent pieces into town to sell. But, unfortunately, they never seemed to take off.

We finished our tour, and John looked me straight in the eye and gave me one of the best hugs I had ever received.

"You're welcome to come back anytime. Maybe I'll see you next week at Eddaviel's show. You can be part of our pod."

Sure enough, the next week, I stuck it out in the rain to watch the genius arrangement of lights, dance, fire acrobatics, video, music, and painting unfold. All the participants were twenty and thirty-year-olds who had birthed a collaborative performance in the middle of a global crisis. I must've returned three more times within that month, getting involved in the kitchen, song circles, and bonfires. They had my curiosity.

I slid John a phone number of a food justice documentary filmmaker I knew, who happened to be a fan of his work, and he sighed and muttered a complaint about food justice initiatives. But when he saw Eddaviel and his team, he kissed them on the cheeks, and I could see the tears emerge into his eyes as he looked straight at theirs.